It is known to print document pages with a position-coding pattern. The resulting position-coded product is thus embedded with positions on its surface. These positions can be retrieved from the product surface by the use of a digital pen, which may have a scanner at its front end for reading the pattern.
This technology can be used to electronically capture and process handwriting (e.g., pen strokes) drawn with the digital pen on the product. By providing different pattern on different products, or even different copies of the products, the captured pen strokes can be uniquely assigned to a specific product or copy. This opens up the possibility of managing the captured pen strokes based on their position content. For example, a system component may direct captured pen strokes to a specific receiving computer that is dedicated to processing data from a specific product. The receiving computer may associate areas on the originating product with processing rules, and process the captured pen strokes according to these rules. Accordingly, the resulting system is transparent to the end user, who may work as if using ordinary pen and paper. Although such a system is simple to use, the underlying system architecture may be complex.
Generally, a design tool is provided to allow a deployer to design a product and to generate a print file that defines one or more copies of the position-coded product. Furthermore, the receiving computer may require an application program for processing the captured pen strokes. Suitably, this application program may operate based on a product definition that defines the placement of a pattern on the product and the location of areas on the product. Thus, a product definition may need to be created and made available to the respective application program. Generally, it may also be desirable for the digital pen to be controlled by the positions on the product, e.g., the pen may vibrate or provide other feedback whenever it is placed on certain areas of a product. Thus, it may be necessary to create and distribute a basic product definition for digital pens. It may also be desirable to distribute one or more background images of the product to the application programs and/or to a peripheral device nearby the user, to allow the captured pen strokes to be displayed to the user against a background image of the product. Such a system may be complex and require distribution of many files of enabling data to different system components.